Distortion Offensive

by James Axler

  As Edwards ambled off down the street, Henny arched one blond eyebrow as Domi came over to join her. “‘The Hen’?” she asked.

  Domi shrugged. “Rule of the Outlands. Adapt and survive.”

  GRANT FOUND CLEM BRYANT in the Cerberus cafeteria. The chef was busily deep-frying some chicken in batter, while other personnel rushed back and forth, dressed in white with their hair held back in nets.

  “Looks fattening,” Grant observed as he approached Clem at the deep-fat fryer.

  Clem glanced at him and smiled, a mischievous twinkle in his blue eyes. “But fattening is tasty,” he said, “and we all deserve a treat once in a while.” Clem was a tall man in his late thirties, with dark hair that swept back from his high forehead, and a trim goatee beard on his chin. An oceanographer by education, Clem was one of the Manitius Moon base freezies who had awoken to a world two hundred years after he had been placed in cryogenic stasis. With little need for his skills in a mountain redoubt, Clem had turned his attention to the culinary arts and found himself quite skillful at cooking, soon taking a permanent position with the facility’s cafeteria staff. Besides being an oceanographer and a chef, Clem was a quiet but personable individual, who enjoyed his own company and revelled in the completion of a puzzle, be it filling in a Sudoku number grid or finding a challenging cryptic crossword among the vast archives of the Cerberus facility. In short, Clem was an obsessive thinker whose mind regularly deconstructed problems to view them from an alternate perspective. “So, how may I help you, Grant?” he asked in his treacle-rich voice.

  Grant held up the clear plastic bag he carried. “I want you to take a look at these,” he explained, unzipping the top of the bag.

  Grant held open the mouth of the bag and Clem peered inside, seeing the mollusks resting there in their glistening shells. “Would you like me to cook them?” he queried.

  “No.” Grant laughed. “I want you to identify them. You’re the ocean guy, right?”

  Bryant nodded before reaching for the handle of his fryer and shaking the sizzling contents. “Oh, yes, I’m the ocean guy,” he agreed. “Why don’t you find yourself a table while I finish up here, and I’ll join you outside in five minutes.”

  “I’ll go snag a coffee,” Grant said and he made his way from the kitchen area with the little bag clutched in his grip.

  A few minutes later, sans hairnet, Clem walked over to the plastic-covered table where Grant was blowing on a steaming cup of java.

  The cafeteria was a large room filled with long, fold-down tables that stretched to seat a dozen people on each side. The tables were covered in a wipe-dry plastic coating. The walls were painted in warm colors, and a line of horizontal, slit windows ran close to the ceiling along the length of the wall farthest from the double door entrance. Because of the size of the room and the amount of available seating, it occasionally doubled for a conference area when something important needed to be announced to all staff, since it lacked the austerity of a more formal venue, which was something Lakesh preferred to avoid. Right now, however, the cafeteria was almost entirely deserted, with just a few personnel sitting finishing a late lunch or enjoying a relaxing drink while they took a well-earned break from their shift. As ever, the room had that scent of all cafeterias the world over, the indefinable musk of warm foods served at strange hours for hungry personnel.

  “Well, then,” Clem began in his warm, friendly voice as he took the seat opposite Grant, “let’s take a look at what you have there, shall we?”

  Grant tipped the bag upside down and carefully laid the six dead crustaceans on the table between them.

  Clem reached for the largest of them, then retracted his hand, clearly thinking better of it. “Are they dead?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Grant assured him. “We couldn’t find any live ones. Believe me, we looked.”

  Fascinated, Clem took the largest of the mollusks—roughly circular and about seven inches in diameter—and held it up to his eyes, turning it over and over in the light. “Where did they come from?” he asked, still gazing at the coruscating patterns on the strange creature’s oil-like shell. The light seemed to waver across its surface, as if seen through a heat haze, and Clem was already speculating that it in fact had a double shell, the dark one below the clear surface shell that created the slightly disarming optical effect.

  “We picked these up on the beachfront at Hope,” Grant explained, “off the Snakefishville coastline.”

  “Snakefish,” Clem muttered, as though doing a quick calculation in his mind. “You mean California.”

  “I mean Snakefishville,” Grant growled, the ancient frame of reference largely lost of himself, a child of the twenty-third century.

  Clem placed the first mollusk down and examined one of the smaller creatures, using a pen to poke at the inside of the shell until the dead creature inside plopped out. It looked like a slug, finished in a dull gray-pink color, and it was clear that it was now wizening up in death, wrinkles marring its fleshy skin. “It’s definitely some kind of shellfish, but I must admit that I don’t recognize the specific type. Where did you say you found this?”

  “Hope,” Grant repeated.

  “No, I mean—” Clem looked up, smiling self-consciously “—in what circumstances?”

  “They’re washing up along the shoreline, just a few here and there, but enough so you can find them if you go looking,” Grant explained. “We found a couple of teens out of it, like they were on something, and it turns out they’d cooked some of these things and been eating them. Figured maybe they had some hallucinogenic properties.”

  Bryant swept his hand over the little array of dead sea creatures that were spread out on the plastic-coated table between them. “You’d need a lot for a decent meal,” he observed.

  “The people in Hope are starving, Clem,” Grant told him. “We were there on a mercy mission to distribute nutrition bars, stuff like that. Domi and Edwards are still there now, helping with basic medical needs with someone…can’t remember her name. Penny something, I think.”

  Clem looked at the broad-shouldered ex-Mag as he tapped at one of the hard shells of the unknown creatures. “I’ll check a few reference tomes and see what I can come up with if you’d like. Would you mind if I take one?”

  “Be my guest,” Grant encouraged. “We brought them back for you to study.”

  “Then study them I shall,” Clem announced as he pushed himself up from the table, gathering the half-dozen shells and placing them back in the plastic bag.

  Grant finished his coffee as he watched the slender figure of Clem speak to his coworkers before making his way from the cafeteria. At the door, Grant saw, Clem met with Mariah Falk, the geologist who had been reduced to walking with a crutch after what had happened out in Tenth City. Clem showed her the plastic bag and the pair of them exited together.

  Grant took one final swig from his coffee cup. “And I guess I’d better go find out what’s cooking downstairs,” he grumbled to himself as he stood up, oblivious to the joke he had just made.

  Chapter 6

  His name was Dylan and he had once been a farmer—a month ago, a lifetime ago. He was forty-two years of age, his dark hair was cut short, and the beginnings of a beard marred his chin now as he trekked through the pouring rain on his way to who knew where. He walked with a slight limp as he made his way along the rain-slick dirt road where it turned to mud, and his right shoulder slouched a little where he had taken a bullet. His right ear, too, had taken a bullet and now his head was patched, a damp bandage held in place by tape where the Cerberus warriors had helped him before they had departed, leaving him and the others to fend for themselves as detonations racked the stone ville of Ten, the brief home of Dylan’s god and master.

  Three weeks ago he had been a farmer, selling his produce in a town called Market out in the Saskatchewan wilds in the northern area once known as Canada. That was before the world had changed, and a god had arrived on Earth to bless him.

&n
bsp; Dylan was a simple man, firm in his narrow-minded belief that physical strength could somehow conquer all obstacles, glorying in his ignorance. He was what his wife called temperamental or, when he was out of earshot, angry. Dylan had lived his life in the mistaken belief that he would someday be important, that he, too, might make the decisions of gods, and so when the god had shown interest in him, he had mistaken this for a sign of his own importance.

  The rain soaked Dylan’s dark hair, pasting it to his head and leaving his clothes wringing wet. He didn’t notice. Nor did he think about his wife anymore, not since meeting with his god.

  There had been a moment, out in Tenth City, where he had seen his old life, embraced it again as though the god had never come. But once the Cerberus warriors had departed, the comforting tone in his skull had begun again, where the stone god called Ullikummis had buried a tiny piece of himself like a farmer sowing a seed.

  Now Dylan walked across the uninhabited countryside, searching for the next town. Once there he would spread his message, spread the word of Lord Ullikummis, and so provide the world with its savior, as so many others were doing across the continent.

  And if the people didn’t listen…?

  Dylan smiled, his hand playing across the pocket of his pants until he felt the clutch of tiny stones that waited there, buds from the body of Ullikummis that would guarantee enlightenment.

  They would listen. One way or another, they would listen.

  As he made his way past a small copse, Dylan saw the lights twinkling in the distance and heard the sounds of music and laughter. There was a settlement here, a handful of cottages where the people farmed together in their struggle for survival. So much of the world remained barely populated, even now, two hundred years after nuclear hostilities had brought them to the brink of extinction, but Dylan knew if you walked far enough in a straight line you would find people.

  He strode onward, smiling as he felt the satisfying chink of the pebbles in his pocket, like that ancient story of Jack with his magic beans. He would take enlightenment to the people around him, and they in turn would spread the gospel of Ullikummis, as others had already begun spreading it into the south.

  Enlightenment was coming, Dylan knew. Enlightenment was coming and the world would change because of it.

  Enlightenment through obedience.

  His name was Dylan and he had once been a farmer; now he was the first.

  REBA DEFORE HAD FINISHED her examination of Balam’s adopted daughter, and she took the time to find a few things for the little girl to play with while she remained locked in the interrogation room with her foster parent, Balam. The playthings were a sterilized medical bowl and some rubber gloves that Kane volunteered to inflate into balloons so that the girl had something to occupy herself besides the weird little doll she had brought with her. She seemed happy enough, bouncing the rubber-glove balloons against the wall and scooping them up with the bowl. Balam watched her with a beatific smile on his lips, and Kane was struck by the sense of pride he seemed to have in his human charge.

  The Cerberus personnel then excused themselves from the room and left Balam alone with his foster child, so that they could privately discuss the ramifications of his revelation.

  “Kid seems happy,” Kane observed as he peered through the one-way mirror window.

  “She’s healthy,” Reba assured him, patting Kane gently on the arm.

  There was a strange bond between Kane and the girl known as Little Quav. Although apparently human, the child was the daughter of a hybrid woman called Quavell who had died shortly after childbirth. However, it was unclear who the father was, or if indeed she had a father at all and wasn’t the result of advanced genetic manipulation. One popular rumor was that Kane had fathered the child, and perhaps not willingly, but Kane had dismissed this as fabrication.

  Though called “Little Quav” after her mother, the child was actually a genetic template in infant form of the reborn Annunaki goddess named Ninlil. Upon Little Quav’s birth, the Annunaki overlord Enlil had sought to bring the child into his custody, for he contended that Ninlil was destined to be his wife as she had been millennia before. When his attempts to take the child had resulted in a Mexican standoff with the Cerberus rebels, an uneasy pact had been formed that saw the acknowledged neutral party of Balam take the child for safekeeping. It had been three years since that decision had been reached, and the Cerberus team had not seen the child or Balam since then. Until today.

  “As long as he’s feeding her human food,” Kane muttered before finally turning away from the observation glass.

  Standing across from the window of the observation room, Lakesh stretched his hands before him in an open gesture. “The people in this room have had more experience with Balam and Quavell than anyone else in this facility,” he began. “So, what does everyone think of his story?”

  Kane turned his attention to the pane of glass for a moment before speaking in an irritated snarl. “Balam can be a cagey son of a bitch at times, but he’s not one to outright lie,” he said. “I don’t know what this Ontic thing is all about, but I guess he wouldn’t come here willingly if it wasn’t important.”

  Brigid spoke up then, addressing Kane’s query but speaking to everyone in the room. “The word ontic is used to describe what is there, the real or factual existence of a thing, as opposed to theories held about it,” she explained.

  “Like chair versus, I don’t know, thought?” Kane suggested, trying to clarify the concept in his mind.

  “Kind of,” Brigid said. “It’s not simply about the physical existence of a thing, however. Francis Bacon famously proposed that different languages rely on the same ontically anchored linguistic structures—if they didn’t, they would simply be jumbles of nouns with no ability to explain larger conceits.”

  Kane nodded. “So, this ontic thing is like the structure that everything conforms to.”

  Brigid winked at him. “We’ll make a philosopher of you yet, Kane.”

  “Not unless he can arm-wrestle the other philosophers you won’t,” Reba suggested, shaking her head. Kane glared at her, but his hostility was tempered with an appreciation of her dry humor.

  “So,” Lakesh said, “this concept underpins reality at a very basic level. If what Balam has described is true, then his Ontic Library is a physical manifestation of the concept itself, and its destruction could lead to irrevocable cataclysm, my friends.”

  “It already has,” Brigid said calmly.

  Lakesh’s blue eyes widened in astonishment. “My goodness, Brigid, why ever would you say that?”

  “We found something out on the coast,” Brigid explained, “in Hope.”

  “Which lies in the extended territory of Snakefishville on the shore of the Pacific,” Kane grumbled, catching her point.

  “Now, this may be a big load of coincidence,” Brigid continued, “but there’s some stuff washing up on the beach that I haven’t seen before. Mollusks, by the look of them—and they are very, very dead. We brought a handful of them back and Grant’s running them by Clem right now, but I wonder if Balam might have some insight.”

  Lakesh stroked at his chin absentmindedly as he thought. “What makes you believe that the two are connected, Brigid, my dear?” he asked, wording his question carefully.

  “Instinct,” Brigid admitted.

  Lakesh gasped when he heard that, unable to contain his surprise.

  Beside him, Donald Bry reminded the older man of something he had been known to say from time to time. “Aren’t you the one who says coincidence can be a very tricky thing, Dr. Singh?”

  Lakesh nodded in acknowledgment. “Let’s show Balam what your team brought back with you,” he instructed Brigid, “and we’ll proceed from there.”

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Grant appeared at the observation room that overlooked the interrogation chamber where Balam waited with Little Quav. He was surprised to find himself the center of attention for Lakesh and the other staff.

 
“Whoa,” Grant requested, holding his hands up in surrender. “I don’t have them.”

  Donald Bry pierced the towering ex-Mag with a concerned frown. “You’ve lost them?”

  “Lost them nothing,” Grant retorted. “I just caught up with Clem, who’s looking them over now, trying to identify what they are. Why? What’s the big rush already?”

  From the rear of the observation room, Kane spoke up, his voice so droll it seemed to be stripped of all emotion. “The world’s going to end because of those seashells.”

  Grant looked at his longtime Magistrate partner, wondering if he was kidding. The look on Kane’s face immediately disabused Grant of any such notion. “World—end?” he said, as if suddenly unable to construct proper sentences.

  “Possibly,” Brigid said, trying to be reassuring. “There’s an underwater facility somewhere off the coast of Hope that Balam tells us is disintegrating.”

  Grant shot a significant look at the scene playing out through the one-way glass. “Yeah, I saw that our little jackalope has come back,” he grumbled.

  “Those shells may be one sign of this facility’s disintegration,” Brigid continued. “If it is destroyed, the whole world could come to an end.”

  “Could?” Grant queried. “I thought Kane said…”

  Brigid waved her hand in the air dismissively. “Kane’s just being melodramatic.”

  But Lakesh spoke up, immediately correcting her. “No, he isn’t,” he said. “While we haven’t established a definite link between these mollusks you brought back and Balam’s alarm, it’s probable that the two are related.”

  “So we’ll revise the alert to probable end of the world,” Kane muttered. “Big deal.”

  Brigid sighed theatrically, but she knew that Kane was right. This was a huge deal, and it was likely to get a lot worse if they didn’t act fast. “I’m going to go get more info from Balam,” Brigid decided, “while you guys find Clem and see what he’s turned up on our find, okay?”